Where morals come to die

Women shot by cops were just delivering papers

Two women who were delivering newspapers in Torrance, Calif., early Thursday were shot by jittery Los Angeles police officers who mistakenly thought cop-hunting fugitive Christopher Dorner might be in their vehicle, NBCLosAngeles.com reported.

The LAPD detectives were in the neighborhood to watch over a home they believed Dorner might target. Hours earlier, the fired cop had allegedly ambushed officers in two other cities, killing one of them.

Across the region, cops on high alert were on the lookout for Dorner’s dark-colored Nissan truck. In the predawn dark, they saw a blue pickup rolling through the streets with no headlights on.

It’s unclear what happened next, but LAPD Chief Charlie Beck confirmed the officers fired on the vehicle, hitting the two occupants. He said it was a tragic case of “mistaken identity.”

Less than a half-hour later, cops fired on another vehicle in Torrance, just two blocks away from the first scene, NBCLosAngeles.com reported. No one was injured in that vehicle, which was similar to Dorner’s truck, police said.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/07/16888732-women-shot-by-cops-were-just-delivering-papers

A Saudi cleric has called for all female babies to be fully covered by wearing the face veil, commonly known as the burka, citing reports of little girls being sexually molested.

Sheikh Abdullah Daoud, stressed that wearing the veil will protect baby girls. The Sheikh tried to back his assertion with claims of sexual molestation against babies in the kingdom, quoting unnamed medical and security sources.

Luckily…

Sheikh Dauod’s statement prompted wide condemnation from his fellow Saudis. Some tweeps called for the Sheikh to be held accountable because his ruling denigrates Islam and breaches individual privacy.

Sheikh Mohammad al-Jzlana, former judge at the Saudi Board of Grievances, told Al Arabiya that Dauod’s ruling was denigrating to Islam and Shariah and made Islam look bad.

So in his opinion Saudi men have so little control that they would even hurt a child if they could see it? Yet, they have so much control that a piece of cloth will stop them?

Japan’s Antarctic whaling fleet has left port on its annual hunt, seeking to kill 900 minke whales and 50 fin whales for what it claims are ‘scientific research’ purposes. (The meat from the hunt is sold commercially.)

The hunt, already controversial, has attracted greater ire from critics with an admission by the Japanese government that it is using funds earmarked for earthquake and tsunami reconstruction to subsidize the fleet’s operations.

Greenpeace accused the Japanese government of diverting 2.28 billion yen (US$30m) from the earthquake recovery fund to help pay for this year’s hunt.

Japan’s Fisheries Agency stated that the money would be used for “stabilising whale research.” In the words of one official: “We will bolster measures against acts of sabotage by anti-whaling groups so as to stably carry out the Antarctic whaling research.”

However, Greenpeace sources told Discovery News that as far as they could tell, 2 billion yen was being appropriated as a straight subsidy for the Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR), the body that runs Japan’s ‘research’ whaling program. This is on top of an existing 700 million yen subsidy. (Update: This Wall Street journal blog quotes a Fisheries Agency official as confirming that 1.8 billion yen is for “supporting whaling research.”)

rtamerica:

After a Florida man picked up a garden hose to try to extinguish a fire that engulfed his neighbor’s house in flames, he was brutally tasered by police in front of his two children.

(via 21st-century-classical-liberal)

weedporndaily:

(StoptheDrugWar) Two county prosecutors in Washington State have dismissed 220 pending marijuana possession cases, in response to the passage of I-502, according to the Seattle Times.

“Although the effective date of I-502 is not until December 6, there is no point in continuing to seek criminal penalties for conduct that will be legal next month,” [King County Prosecutor Dan] Satterberg said in a statement.

(via pon-raul)

rtamerica:

Utility workers from across the US are descending on the Northeastern states left ravaged by Superstorm Sandy, but some volunteers making the trek are being told they can’t pitch in since they don’t belong to a union.

WOOPS.

(via 21st-century-classical-liberal)

iheartchaos:

Is Lucas terminally ill or something? After selling Lucasfilm to Disney for a massive $4 billion dollars, George Lucas announced that he’s giving all of it to charity. Since he owned 100% of the company and had almost no debt, that $4 billion is all his to do with what he wants. So he’s giving it away. 

Read More

Oh would you look at that, 4 billion in donations to charity FROM A SINGLE PERSON without needing taxation!

A young black woman in the US state of Louisiana apparently staged a racist attack in which she told police that three men set her ablaze and scrawled KKK on her car, officials said Tuesday.

“The wounds were self-inflicted,” Kyle Hanrahan, a spokesman for the FBI’s Louisiana bureau, told AFP.

Sharmeka Moffitt, 20, was seriously burned in the incident and remains in critical condition.

She called police from a park in the town of Winnsboro on Sunday night and told them three men in white hoodies doused her with a flammable liquid and ignited it.

The letters KKK, for the white supremacist organization Ku Klux Klan, and a racial slur were scrawled on her car in what appeared to be toothpaste.

The FBI was called in to assist local authorities because the incident was initially considered a possible hate crime.

The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.

The Pirate Bay is loved by millions of file-sharers but is also a thorn in the side of the entertainment industries.

The latter group continues to push authorities to take action against the site. The Pirate Bay was raided back in 2006 and there are rumors that the police might try again in the near future.

The Pirate Bay is not oblivious to this looming threat. They have backups in place and are shielding the true location of their servers. Nevertheless, should the site lose all its servers it might take a while to get back online.

This is one of the reasons why The Pirate Bay decided to move the site into the cloud yesterday. The switch resulted in five minutes downtime and was hardly noticed by the public, but it’s a big change for the infamous BitTorrent site.

Hosting in the cloud also makes the site easier to scale, it reduces downtime, and is also cheaper.

“Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay is currently hosted at cloud hosting companies in two countries where they run several Virtual Machine (VM) instances.

“Running on VMs cuts down operation costs and complexity. For example, we never need anyone to do hands-on work like earlier this month when we were down for two days because someone had to fix a broken power distribution unit,” The Pirate Bay says.

While most of Pirate Bay’s former servers are now obsolete, not everything was moved to the cloud.

The load balancer and transit-routers are still owned and operated by The Pirate Bay, which allows the site to hide the location of the cloud provider. It also helps to secure the privacy of the site’s users.

The hosting providers have no idea that they’re hosting The Pirate Bay, and even in the event they found out it would be impossible for them to gather data on the users.

“The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they’re running TPB, they can’t look at the content of user traffic or user’s IP-addresses.”

Mitt Romney called Monday for a change of course in America’s Middle East policy, accusing President Obama of sitting on the sidelines in the face of a “profound upheaval” across the region. The Republican nominee pledged that, if elected, he would prosecute a far more engaged foreign policy, including helping to arm the opposition in Syria’s bloody civil war.

Romney spoke at the Virginia Military Institute in what was billed as a major foreign policy address. After aggressively challenging the incumbent on economics at last week’s debate, Romney is looking to build on that performance with a more robust explanation of how he’d lead in the world, not just America.

“The greater tragedy of it all is that we’re missing an historic opportunity to win new friends who share our values in the Middle East,” Romney said. “Unfortunately, so many of these people who could be our friends feel that our president is indifferent to their quest for freedom and dignity.”

Ah yes, JUST WHAT WE NEED! To arm the opposition party, and then invade them later on claiming that they’re terrorists! Afghanistan? What are you talking about?

Romney is doing himself no favors setting himself up as a warhawk and claiming Obama isn’t warhawk-ish enough. Obama has contributed just as much, if not more, to the deaths in the Middle East/North Africa.

A St. Charles County sheriff’s deputy was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for breaking the law while he and other officers were at a Middletown, Mo., home to apprehend a wanted meth cook.

In August, a jury found Christopher E. Hunt, 38, guilty of felony burglary and misdemeanor assault and property damage after a three-day trial that pitted police officer against police officer.

The charges stemmed from the Feb. 5, 2009, arrest of Phillip Alberternst, who was wanted on several felonies related to meth-making. Hunt and three other members of the St. Charles County Regional Drug Task Force were assisting members of the East Central Drug Task Force — which serves Warren, Audrain and Montgomery counties — with the arrest.

In arguments during the trial, Montgomery County Prosecutor Nicole Volkert said officers had agreed to try a consensual search because they didn’t have a search warrant, but when Hunt showed up later, he kicked in a porch door and beat “a helpless, naked man” who was not resisting. The burglary charge stemmed from him going into the home.

At the sentencing, Hunt broke down several times while reading a statement in which he detailed his military service with the Marines and his lifelong desire to be a police officer. He said on the day of Alberternst’s arrest, he felt everyone around him was in danger.

Before I post this story I just want to point out that there’s a PDF linked with what appears to be the case, but outside of that there doesn’t seem to be any sources for it that aren’t infowars or sites like it. So take that with a grain of salt.

Motorists can be held indefinitely at toll booths if they pay with large denomination bills, according to a federal appeals court ruling handed down Wednesday. A family of drivers — Joel, Deborah and Robert Chandler — filed suit last year arguing they were effectively being held hostage by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) and the private contractor in charge of the state’s toll road, Faneuil, Inc.

Under FDOT policies in place at the time, motorists who paid with $50 bills, and occasionally even $5 bills, were not given permission to proceed until the toll collector filled out a “Bill Detection Report” with data about the motorist’s vehicle and details from his driver’s license. Many of those who chose to pay cash did so to avoid the privacy implications of installing a SunPass transponder that recorded their driving habits. They were likewise unwilling to provide personal information to the toll collector, but they had no alternative because the toll barrier would not be raised without compliance. FDOT policy does not allow passengers to exit their vehicle, and backing up is illegal and usually impossible while other cars wait behind. FDOT dropped the Bill Detection Reports in 2010.

A three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit US Court of Appeals did not buy the argument that these motorist detentions rose to the level of a constitutional violation.

“The fact that a person is not free to leave on his own terms at a given moment, however, does not, by itself, mean that the person has been ‘seized’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment,” the court wrote in its unsigned decision. “In Florida, a person’s right and liberty to use a highway is not absolute; it may be regulated in the public interest through reasonable and reasonably executed regulations.”

The judges found it was reasonable for Fanueil to set regulations for use of the road — including the types of acceptable payment. The court decided that drivers implicitly agreed to those conditions by choosing to use the toll road.

“The Chandlers have not alleged that they were forced to pay their tolls with large-denomination bills, thereby subjecting themselves to whatever delay was caused by completion of the Bill Detection Report,” the court ruled. “They chose to pay their toll with large-denomination bills. Nor have they alleged that they asked to withdraw the large report-triggering bill in favor of a smaller delay-free bill and were denied that opportunity.”

The court dismissed the lawsuit in its entirety.

stuff-that-irks-me:

A college professor has been placed on leave after she allegedly forced her class to sign a pledge to vote for President Obama in the upcoming elections.

Early last week Professor Sharon Sweet at Brevard Community College (BCC) allegedly told students to sign a pledge that reads: “I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.”

The pledge was printed off of GottaVote.org, a website funded by the Obama campaign.

Oh look, voter crap showing up on both sides. How totally unexpected.

(via pon-raul)

reddawnmatador:

thevocalibertarian:

rtamerica:

The White House has asked the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals to place an emergency stay on a ruling made last week by a federal judge so that the president’s power to indefinitely detain Americans without charge is reaffirmed immediately.

Here it comes.

Goddamnit.

Wake up people. Wake up. This man is not your friend. He has never been on your side. He never will be.

(via reddawnmatador-deactivated20121)